Headcanon / State of the Character
Sep. 24th, 2018 08:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
playingtrack3Specifically for the benefit of canonmates, with regards to how I play him, and thoughts on how certain canon events have affected him... and how that might inform his CR. There's a bit of OOC/IRL mun knowledge scattered through toward the end, too, and discussion of a few triggering subjects, so. If you'd care not to read that, I've marked where it starts. You won't lose any of the IC stuff by leaving off there.
OKAY, SO. In "The Last of the Time Lords", the Doctor (Tenth) explains that at the age of eight, the Master was brought as a prospective Time Lord to stand in front of the Untempered Schism: a window into a vortex that showed all of space and time. In the Doctor's words, "Some would run away. Some would be inspired. And some would go mad." The Master went mad, surely. But that wasn't all. Centuries in the future, the Time Lord Council on Gallifrey retroactively implant the sound of a four-beat drumming pattern in the Master's head at this moment to act as a psychic link between him and all of Gallifrey. They also send a White-Point-Star diamond to Earth at a specific point in time, planning to use the link and the Star in conjunction, manipulating the Master into freeing Gallifrey from where it has been frozen in time. (Earmark that. We'll come back to it eventually.)
As a child, the Master has no idea of any of this: he just knows that he's seen all of time and space and come away from it with an incessant drumming sound in his head. It starts out softly, not so much a nuisance or a problem as a constant subtle presence, like the ticking of a clock in the back of a busy room. His madness presents more evidently in a fondness for violence and manipulation: games, schemes, cruel little tricks. They're harmless at first, during his days at the Prydonian Academy: pranks on professors and fellow students, the sort of things children naturally get up to. But as he gets older, the drumming gets louder. His dearest friends, The Doctor and The Rani, manage to help keep him on an even keel ... but when the Doctor steals a TARDIS and goes adventuring, and the Rani is exiled for her own scientific experiments, no one is left to keep the Master in check. Gallifreyan record is not sure whether the Master was kicked off his home planet or if he simply left, but ... headcanon states that he went chasing after his oldest and best friend. The Doctor had promised to visit every star in the universe with him, after all ... leaving without him was not only terribly rude, but really quite heartbreaking. What's a madman to do but burn the universe in pursuit of his bestie?
The Master had burned through all 12 of his regenerations by the time the Doctor had only reached his 3rd, by the time he first appeared in canon: a fact which means he wasn't just scheming and violent, but reckless. Even then, he eventually cheated death by transferring his consciousness into three other bodies. All of this body-hopping just made the drumming more prominent in his mind, since his consciousness was the only "original" part of him left, and the Master began falling farther and farther into madness, and what had started out as friendship had soured completely into all-out rivalry against the Doctor, and a single-minded hatred. (How's that for covering almost fifty years of canon and five actors?)
At some point during the Time War, while the Master was still borrowing the body of a human EMT, the Time Lord Council approached him and made an offer: if he served Gallifrey in the war, they'd reward him with a brand new, full compliment of 13 more regenerations. He agreed, but went back on the deal once the regenerations were granted, fleeing and concealing his identity with a Chameleon Arch - a device which makes Time Lords appear to be human in every aspect, locking their consciousness away and replacing it with a fasle one to match the human persona. The Master lived out an entire human lifetime this way, until he was found in his old age by the Doctor, and reminded enough of his heritage to open the Chameleon Arch and regain his memories and his true self. He was mortally wounded not long after, and regenerated into the scrawny hot mess you'll be getting to know over the course of our CR.
As if having his true self locked away for give or take 70 years wasn't bad enough, he was killed and resurrected AGAIN in the same body by a fanatical cult, which botched the resurrection, temporarily messing up his Time Lord biology and giving him some very odd superpowers that we won't go into here, and a really, really ravenous appetite to compensate for all the energy said powers consumed. At this point, he finally found out that the Time Lords had manipulated and brainwashed him, and that most of his madness and warmongering weren't ...Really Who He Was, so to speak. Canon puts it that he was sucked back through the temporal anomaly to Gallifrey at that point, and presumably died: but he shows up later on a Mondasian refugee spaceship looking 100% spiffier, minus the crazy superpowers and appetite, and drum-free. It isn't specifically said what happened to make him "better", but my guess is a combination of time catching up with itself and the Master going apeshit on the Council had something to do with it. (There is apparently a canonical short story out there which offhandedly mentions the Master choking Rassilon to death with a handful of the same White Point Stars he used to manipulate him, which makes me extremely happy.)
So where does that leave our friend The Master/Harold Saxon/Razor/Whatever at the canonpoint I tend to use? HERE BE HEADCANON.
He spent most of his time on Mondas just blindly scheming and going through the motions of taking the place over, because it was what he was used to doing, but over the course of things, he started thinking about how much of it was what he wanted, and how much was echoes of Rassilon's manipulation. Having decided that being bad still felt FAR too good, he kept it up, but is still very shaken on the subject of Who He Is. I foresee his various aliases in games or memes as serving a dual purpose: not just to disguise his identity, but to help him forge it fully on his own, much as the Doctor does each time he regenerates. ("I think I'm this sort of person today. Does it fit? ... No, that's rubbish, forget it.") Whereas this self-discovery only takes a matter of a day for a normal regeneration, this is the process of editing several centuries of brainwashing, so it's going to take a lot longer. There are behaviors that he might question, and other behaviors he might keep, just because they still feel good: in that respect, he's very much like a teenager in the process of growing up.
OKAY, SO. In "The Last of the Time Lords", the Doctor (Tenth) explains that at the age of eight, the Master was brought as a prospective Time Lord to stand in front of the Untempered Schism: a window into a vortex that showed all of space and time. In the Doctor's words, "Some would run away. Some would be inspired. And some would go mad." The Master went mad, surely. But that wasn't all. Centuries in the future, the Time Lord Council on Gallifrey retroactively implant the sound of a four-beat drumming pattern in the Master's head at this moment to act as a psychic link between him and all of Gallifrey. They also send a White-Point-Star diamond to Earth at a specific point in time, planning to use the link and the Star in conjunction, manipulating the Master into freeing Gallifrey from where it has been frozen in time. (Earmark that. We'll come back to it eventually.)
As a child, the Master has no idea of any of this: he just knows that he's seen all of time and space and come away from it with an incessant drumming sound in his head. It starts out softly, not so much a nuisance or a problem as a constant subtle presence, like the ticking of a clock in the back of a busy room. His madness presents more evidently in a fondness for violence and manipulation: games, schemes, cruel little tricks. They're harmless at first, during his days at the Prydonian Academy: pranks on professors and fellow students, the sort of things children naturally get up to. But as he gets older, the drumming gets louder. His dearest friends, The Doctor and The Rani, manage to help keep him on an even keel ... but when the Doctor steals a TARDIS and goes adventuring, and the Rani is exiled for her own scientific experiments, no one is left to keep the Master in check. Gallifreyan record is not sure whether the Master was kicked off his home planet or if he simply left, but ... headcanon states that he went chasing after his oldest and best friend. The Doctor had promised to visit every star in the universe with him, after all ... leaving without him was not only terribly rude, but really quite heartbreaking. What's a madman to do but burn the universe in pursuit of his bestie?
The Master had burned through all 12 of his regenerations by the time the Doctor had only reached his 3rd, by the time he first appeared in canon: a fact which means he wasn't just scheming and violent, but reckless. Even then, he eventually cheated death by transferring his consciousness into three other bodies. All of this body-hopping just made the drumming more prominent in his mind, since his consciousness was the only "original" part of him left, and the Master began falling farther and farther into madness, and what had started out as friendship had soured completely into all-out rivalry against the Doctor, and a single-minded hatred. (How's that for covering almost fifty years of canon and five actors?)
At some point during the Time War, while the Master was still borrowing the body of a human EMT, the Time Lord Council approached him and made an offer: if he served Gallifrey in the war, they'd reward him with a brand new, full compliment of 13 more regenerations. He agreed, but went back on the deal once the regenerations were granted, fleeing and concealing his identity with a Chameleon Arch - a device which makes Time Lords appear to be human in every aspect, locking their consciousness away and replacing it with a fasle one to match the human persona. The Master lived out an entire human lifetime this way, until he was found in his old age by the Doctor, and reminded enough of his heritage to open the Chameleon Arch and regain his memories and his true self. He was mortally wounded not long after, and regenerated into the scrawny hot mess you'll be getting to know over the course of our CR.
As if having his true self locked away for give or take 70 years wasn't bad enough, he was killed and resurrected AGAIN in the same body by a fanatical cult, which botched the resurrection, temporarily messing up his Time Lord biology and giving him some very odd superpowers that we won't go into here, and a really, really ravenous appetite to compensate for all the energy said powers consumed. At this point, he finally found out that the Time Lords had manipulated and brainwashed him, and that most of his madness and warmongering weren't ...Really Who He Was, so to speak. Canon puts it that he was sucked back through the temporal anomaly to Gallifrey at that point, and presumably died: but he shows up later on a Mondasian refugee spaceship looking 100% spiffier, minus the crazy superpowers and appetite, and drum-free. It isn't specifically said what happened to make him "better", but my guess is a combination of time catching up with itself and the Master going apeshit on the Council had something to do with it. (There is apparently a canonical short story out there which offhandedly mentions the Master choking Rassilon to death with a handful of the same White Point Stars he used to manipulate him, which makes me extremely happy.)
So where does that leave our friend The Master/Harold Saxon/Razor/Whatever at the canonpoint I tend to use? HERE BE HEADCANON.
He spent most of his time on Mondas just blindly scheming and going through the motions of taking the place over, because it was what he was used to doing, but over the course of things, he started thinking about how much of it was what he wanted, and how much was echoes of Rassilon's manipulation. Having decided that being bad still felt FAR too good, he kept it up, but is still very shaken on the subject of Who He Is. I foresee his various aliases in games or memes as serving a dual purpose: not just to disguise his identity, but to help him forge it fully on his own, much as the Doctor does each time he regenerates. ("I think I'm this sort of person today. Does it fit? ... No, that's rubbish, forget it.") Whereas this self-discovery only takes a matter of a day for a normal regeneration, this is the process of editing several centuries of brainwashing, so it's going to take a lot longer. There are behaviors that he might question, and other behaviors he might keep, just because they still feel good: in that respect, he's very much like a teenager in the process of growing up.
